David Hone

Climate Change Advisor for Shell

Hello and welcome to my blog. There's lots said about why climate change now confronts us, and what it means, but the real issue is what to do about it. Plenty is said about that too, but there's not enough discussion on the practical aspects of implementation. Focusing on energy, that's what my blog sets out to achieve.

A simple choice – 4°C or a carbon price

As if following on deliberately from the PWC report which I wrote about last week, come two new initiatives announced this Monday.

The first is a report from the World Bank and is the flip side of the PWC finding that a 2°C goal is now effectively out of reach. Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided, has been commissioned by the Climate Change Adaptation team at the World Bank, utilising the expertise of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Starting with the impacts that we are already seeing in a 0.8°C world, it looks at the unsettling prospects of a 2°C world and then the somewhat alarming implications of letting the climate issue slide and all of us wandering, eyes wide open, into a 4°C world.

The report is measured in its approach, not relying on histrionics to gets its message across. Rather, by stepping through the issue in terms of areas of concern against current observations, 2°C and 4°C impacts it gives the reader clarity in terms of where we are now, the political space currently targeted and the expected consequences in the medium term of not acting. The report also notes that impacts such as sea level rise will play out over many hundred of years, causing ongoing disruption over that period. A wealth of data is presented from a variety of sources, covering concerns such as ocean acidification, ice loss (sea level rise), extreme temperature events, agricultural impacts, water stress, disease vectors, non-linear change and changes to critical eco-systems.

The President of the World Bank Group, Dr. Jim Yong Kim sums up the issue very clearly in his forward:

We are well aware of the uncertainty that surrounds these scenarios and we know that different scholars and studies sometimes disagree on the degree of risk. But the fact that such scenarios cannot be discarded is sufficient to justify strengthening current climate change policies. Finding ways to avoid that scenario is vital for the health and welfare of communities around the world. While every region of the world will be affected, the poor and most vulnerable would be hit hardest. A 4°C world can, and must, be avoided.

Avoiding 4°C brings me to the second initiative of the day, the Carbon Price Communique. This is a statement released at an event in Brussels by the The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (CLG), a group which brings together business leaders from major UK, EU, and international companies who believe that there is an urgent need to develop new and longer term policies for tackling climate change. The statement serves as a timely reminder of the need for a carbon price within the global energy system, ideally delivered through national and regional market based policies such as the ETS in Europe. The Communique follows from similar statements in previous years, but is much more focussed on a specific policy recommendation that all governments now need to take on board. At launch, the Communique had been signed by well over 100 companies, with the numbers growing daily.

Putting a clear, transparent and unambiguous price on carbon emissions must be a core policy objective. Although there are a number of mechanisms that can be used to do this, as businesses we would focus on working through the market, utilizing approaches such as emissions trading which offer both environmental integrity and flexibility for business. A price on carbon will reveal the lowest cost pathway to existing emissions reduction goals and can open the door to increased ambition.

The strongest evidence for the need for a carbon price comes from one technology, carbon capture and storage. Without it, there is little possibility of balancing rapidly growing energy needs against an atmosphere with a finite capacity to hold CO2 and stay below a given temperature threshold. But getting CCS will require a price on CO2 emissions. Along the way, a clear pricing structure will deliver rapid fuel switching, new bioenergy technologies and renewable power generation. But the eventual prize is CCS, also because it is currently the only known approach to deliver a reliable negative emissions scenario which the World Bank 4°C report identifies as the necessary approach to actually reverse some of the damaging impacts it identifies (e.g. ocean acidity beginning to recover by the end of this century).

More companies need to read, recognize and sign the Carbon Price Communique in the coming weeks.

The PWC report is a reminder that the lack of substantive action today has consequences. In support, the World Bank has given us a clear heads up on what those consequences are. Finally, there is the Carbon price Communique and the growing level of business interest behind it. This is what governments now need to do and it is clear that a significant portion of the business community is there to support such action.

8 Comments

There is one easy way how to debunk this alarms. The Earth temperature was similar (or even warmer) in Holocene compared to the present while CO2 levels were flat. This is the inconvinient truth which immediatelly destroys all alarmist nonsense. Forget icehockey nonsense IPCC and carbon lobyists are recycling. You surely know the story about Viking settlements of Greenland but there is yet another example: Reindeer living at Franz Josef Land in Artics. http://hol.sagepub.com/content/10/6/763.abstract
While Reindeer 1300 years ago lived quite hapilly at this remote Arctic location they extinct due to the Little Ice Age striking in the last millenia. Strange coincidence with Viking settlements and many proxies which are being sucesfully ignored by IPCC so called scientists.
This indicates that recovery from the Little Ice Age is into large extend natural phenomenon and CO2 (including water vapour feedback) has much lower impact than IPCC failed models show.
This makes your fairy tale global warming funny if it wouldn’t ask to transfer trilions from common people into the carbon market.

The study from WB is ridiculous. They really succeeded to shock me to laugh. E.g. they claim that if we continue to release the bad CO2 the world can warm by 4C by 2060. It means whooping 0.8C/decade. Even the most alarming temperature series are unable to squeeze out more warming than 0.18C/decade over the last two decades. It is not a surprise because the last decade temperature hasn’t risen at all. I guess they should scale back a little bit in alarmism. Even IPCC wasn’t as funny reading and even politicians might start to realise that. After all climate is our least worry when trying to recover economy from the green energy.

No. It is not a simple choice. First, 4oC is a projection, based on multiple models which have demonstrated limited skill in forcasting. Second, it is almost certain that any carbon price which might be chosen would be wrong, in that it would not achieve the desired reduction in carbon emissions.

“Predictions are very hard, especially about the future.”. Yogi Berra, American philiosopher

‘My Dear Bernie, as you have a scientific training you should know there can be no CO2-AGW. The ~100 m IR emission/absorption depth of the atmosphere is within 1 deg of the Earth’s surface so its thermal IR, near enough black body, switches off IR in those same bands at the surface apart from a few water vapour sidebands.

No IR absorption, no ‘GHG blanket’, no CO2-AGW. This is basic radiation physics. Unfortunately, meteorologists like Trenberth are taught incorrect physics and imagine ‘pyrgeometers’, IR pyrometers, measure a real energy flux, not a temperature signal. So, the models exaggerate warming by ~6.8x.

Please tell the loonies at DECC there can be no CO2 climate change, the Earth is cooling as the sun’s magnetic field heads below 1500 Gauss and cloud cover increases and we should be planning for ice blocking the Northern ports from ~2020. This has been the biggest scientific and commercial fraud in history and DECC is at the heart of it.’

Alec,
You are of course welcome to your view on the physics and it may well be the case that some meteorologists don’t study physics to the necessary depth, but lots of physicists and atmospheric chemists do. I think we would be wise to listen to them and foolish to dismiss their understanding of the subject and the behaviour of IR in the atmosphere.
David

Alec, your link appears not to work for me. I have one simple test for you. Can you explain existence of tropopause without IR absorption/emission? Geenhouse effect explain its existence quite well so I wonder if your explanation could be better.

Thank you for your measured comment on this issue. You are certainly right. It is good to see that cooperations, even those in the fossil fuel industries, are realizing that the warming world will lead to economic disaster.

It is unfortunate that it took this angle to sture you people in to sitting up. Especially since it is not just the economy that is threatened, but our species and the very life soul of the planet.